Howell, Dorothy

(bBirmingham, 25 Feb 1898; d Malvern, 12 Jan 1982). English composer. She completed her general education early in order to study with McEwen and Matthay at the RAM. She was a talented pianist as well as a composer, and much of her work is for the piano, most notably the concerto. She gained recognition in 1919 when her symphonic poem Lamia was given its première at the Promenade Concerts by Sir Henry Wood and was performed four more times that same season. Her style is essentially Romantic, often drawing on nature and landscape for inspiration. The music is tonal, coloured by rich harmonies and chromaticism. The Phantasy for violin and piano won the Cobbett Prize in 1921. Her use of mainly small-scale genres in later works – for piano, voice or ensemble – was partly due to the restrictions of ill-health. From 1924 to 1970 she was professor of harmony and counterpoint at the RAM, and in 1971 was elected a member of the Royal Philharmonic Society. A catalogue of Howell's works (compiled by Celia Mike) is held at the British Library.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Howell, Gwynne (Richard)

(b Gorseinon, 13 June 1938). Welsh bass. He studied at the RMCM, where he sang Leporello in concert and Hunding, Fasolt and Pogner on stage. In August 1968 he joined Sadler’s Wells, making his début as Monterone (Rigoletto), and playing, among other roles, the Commendatore, Colline and the Cook (The Love for Three Oranges). Howell’s Covent Garden début was as First Nazarene in Salome (1970); his many parts there have included Richard Taverner in the première of Maxwell Davies’s Taverner, Timur, the Landgrave (Tannhäuser), Pimen, Padre Guardiano (La forza del destino) and the main Wagnerian bass roles. With the ENO he has sung many leading roles, notably Hans Sachs, Gurnemanz, King Philip II and Bartók’s Bluebeard; his parts for the WNO have included the Ruler in the première of Maxwell Davies’s The Doctor of Myddfai (1996) and Monteverdi's Seneca. A voice of mellow, well-rounded timbre (slightly less imposing at the bottom of its compass) and a tall, dignified figure have aided his natural aptitude for basso cantante roles; his authority and quiet dignity have often provided performances with their bedrock of security. His recordings include Walter in Luisa Miller, Capellio in I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Jero in Le siège de Corinthe and the bass roles in choral works from Bach to Elgar.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.Blyth: ‘Gwynne Howell’, Opera, xlii (1991), 1018–25

MAX LOPPERT

Howell, John

(bc1670; d 15 July 1708). English countertenor. He was a boy chorister and later a lay vicar at Westminster Abbey. He sang in the Chapel Royal from 1691, and the Royal Private Music and St Paul's Cathedral from 1697. His singing at St Paul's was satirized by Thomas Brown: ‘H—ll was a stretching his Lungs in order to maintain a long white Wig, and a Hackney Coach’. Purcell wrote ‘High counter tenor for Mr. Howell’ against the countertenor and bass duet ‘Hark, each tree’ in the 1692 St Cecilia ode and included solos for him in two birthday odes, Celebrate this festival (1693) and Who can from joy refrain? (1695). These parts, rising to c'' and above, are markedly higher than those Purcell wrote for his other countertenors.

Howells, Herbert (Norman)

(b Lydney, Glos., 17 Oct 1892; d London, 23 Feb 1983). English composer andteacher. The youngest of six children, he showed early musical promise and announced his intention of becoming a composer while still a young child. Although the Howells family was not wealthy, thanks to the generosity of a local landowner he was able to study with Brewer at Gloucester Cathedral. In 1912, after two years as Brewer's articled pupil, during which time he also befriended and was influenced by his fellow pupil Gurney, Howells won an open scholarship to the RCM where his principal teachers were Stanford (composition) and Charles Wood (counterpoint). There, he came under the influence of Parry, whose philosophy and humanity inspired a deep and lasting affection. Howells was one of the most brilliant and technically gifted students of a generation which included Bliss, Benjamin and Gurney, and after only a few weeks on Stanford's recommendation, his Mass in the Dorian Mode was sung in Westminster Cathedral. Stanford was an important figure in his early career, describing him as his ‘son in music’. He conducted the première of Howells's First Piano Concerto in 1913 and persuaded him to enter his Piano Quartet (1916) in the first of the Carnegie Trust's composition competitions, where it won an award.

Severe ill-health cut short Howells's first appointment (sub-organist at Salisbury Cathedral) in 1917, and for a time he was not expected to live. During his years of convalescence, 1917–20, the Carnegie Trust employed him as Terry's assistant in the editing of Tudor manuscripts, and procured for him a teaching appointment at the RCM (where he remained until well into his 80s). These years of enforced leisure were among his most productive, and much of his orchestral and chamber music dates from this time. In later years, teaching, examining and adjudicating left him with less time for composition; but these activities were always more than a means of earning a living, and he regarded contact with students and amateurs as an essential stimulus to his own creativity. From 1936 to 1962 he was director of music at St Paul's Girls' School, Hammersmith, where he succeeded Holst, and in 1950 he was appointed King Edward VII Professor of Music at London University, playing a central role in the establishment of a full-time honours school in music. From 1941 to 1945 he deputised for Robin Orr as organist of St John's College, Cambridge. He rose quickly to fame as a composer of songs, chamber music and orchestral pieces, but his extensive contribution to cathedral music, which in later years dominated his reputation, did not begin until the late 1940s.

Howells held many other appointments including the presidencies of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, the Plainsong and Mediaeval Music Society and the Royal College of Organists. In 1931 he became the first John Collard Fellow of the Worshipful Company of Musicians and in 1959 succeeded Elgar and Vaughan Williams as the third John Collard Life Fellow. He was Master of the Company in 1959–60. In 1937 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Music at Oxford, and in 1961 was awarded an honorary doctorate at Cambridge, where he was made an honorary fellow of St John's College in 1966. Other honours included the CBE (1953) and CH (1972). He wrote a number of articles in a rich, allusive style, and delivered many radio talks.

Howells's mature style skilfully interweaves a number of strands. Of his formative influences, probably the most important were modal counterpoint, derived from Tudor models, Elgar in his elegiac aspects and Vaughan Williams, whose Tallis Fantasia had a galvanising effect on the young composer, and whose Pastoral Symphony (on which Howells wrote a seminal article) deeply influenced the string quartet In Gloucestershire, the most substantial of Howells's instrumental works. To these must also be added the topography of his native Gloucestershire, and his love of English literature. These quintessentially English ingredients are mixed with an un-English technical assurance and made piquant by richly sensuous harmonies, arguably more French in origin (he knew Ravel). The early chamber works, notably the Piano Quartet, the Phantasy String Quartet (1916), the Rhapsodic Quintet for clarinet and strings (1919, another Carnegie award winner) and In Gloucestershire, reveal both a natural poet in sound and a musician keenly alive to structural problems. The strong melodic impulse is often vocal in feeling, the texture subtly distinctive. Here already are many of the qualities that made him the finest-grained of the Georgians. Howells, by the early 1920s with a string of successes behind him, was a composer of whom much was expected. Two major orchestral commissions, Sine nomine (1922) and the Second Piano Concerto (1925), saw him grappling with the problem of single movement form, but neither work was well received, and the failure of the concerto's première followed by its withdrawal (it was not revived until after the composer's death), brought about a creative crisis. Howells, immersing himself in teaching and adjudicating, produced few substantial works between 1925 and 1935, when personal tragedy unlocked his creativity.

There is in all of Howells's best music an underlying, elegiac sense of transience and loss. He was deeply affected by the human waste of World War I and his Elegy (1917), composed in memory of a close friend killed in the fighting, is an eloquent expression of personal grief. The death from polio of his own nine-year-old son in 1935 affected him at the deepest level, and it is arguable that most of his subsequent works were, to a greater or lesser degree, influenced by it. A cello concerto on which he was working at the time was particularly associated in his mind with the boy's death and, perhaps for this reason, Howells was unable to complete it, though the first and second movements survive as the Fantasia and Threnody for cello and orchestra. It is possible that the slow movement of the final version of In Gloucestershire was also composed in the aftermath of this tragedy. Partly in order to overcome his intense grief, and drawing on an earlier Requiem for unaccompanied voices (1932), Howells composed Hymnus paradisi for soloists, chorus and orchestra, generally accounted his masterpiece. Here, the sense of loss is found to be inseparable from a visionary splendour in a way that suggests a deep affinity with Delius. Largely complete by 1938, it remained a private document until 1950 when Howells, persuaded by Sumsion, Vaughan Williams and Finzi, conducted the first performance at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester Cathedral. The work's success led to the composition of other works for similar forces, the Missa Sabrinensis (1954) and Stabat Mater (1963–5), both scores which present amateur choralists with prodigious difficulties. In these works, and in the equally fine Concerto for Strings (1938) whose slow movement is another elegy for Howells's son, there is a rare mastery of soft dissonance, intricately variegated texture and refined sonority. These qualities are evident in other works, including A Maid Peerless for women's chorus, the unaccompanied Take him, earth, for cherishing and The summer is coming, and in the music for the church to which he turned in his later years.

Howells had a lifelong love of cathedral architecture and most of his church music was written for specific buildings, choirs and individuals. In the sacred works, he found the perfect niche for his languid romanticism, a love of choral texture and resonant acoustics, in music of chromatic sensuousness. He created an ecclesiastical style for the 20th century as Stanford had done for the 19th. The essentially reflective, introvert and nostalgic nature of the office of Evensong found echoes in Howells's own persona, and at the heart of his religious music stand 16 settings of the canticles, of which those for King's College, Cambridge (Collegium Regale, 1945), Gloucester (1946) and St Paul's Cathedral (1951) have established firm places in the repertory. There are a number of large-scale anthems, among which The House of the Mind (1954) and A Sequence for St Michael (1961) are outstanding examples.

Among the best of Howells's songs are his settings of verses by de la Mare, a personal friend. They include the cycle Peacock Pie (1919) and the collection A Garland for de la Mare (1919–73). For the poet, King David was the perfect setting. In setting the Georgian poets, his ingrained sense of the transience of beauty saved him from the clichéd style of some of his contemporaries. His distinguished body of organ music includes four rhapsodies, two sets of psalm-preludes and two sonatas, the second (1932) being his largest and most important solo work. The late Partita (1971–2), written in a spare, austere, almost neo-classical idiom, shares characteristics with the contemporaneous Sonatina for piano. In two sets of miniatures, Lambert's Clavichord (1926–7) and Howells' Clavichord (1941–61), and in Master Tallis's Testament (1940) for organ, Howells, who used flippantly to describe himself as a reincarnation of one of the lesser Tudor composers, alludes to the world of the Elizabethan virginalists, but placed in an unmistakenly modern idiom.

Howells's star rose early and seemed to wane in the late 1920s. Although the success of Hymnus paradisi and the late outpouring of church music re-established his reputation – to the postwar generation, he was known for little else – he did not achieve the position at the pinnacle of English music that was predicted for him. However, the posthumous rediscovery of his early instrumental and orchestral music has revealed a composer of range and depth, and at the close of the 20th century his importance was becoming better understood.

‘Distribution of Diplomas, January 1959’, Calendar of the Royal College of Organists (1959–60), 27–30

‘Charles Wood’, English Church Music (1966), 59–60

‘Hubert Parry’, ML, l (1969), 223–9

‘Sir William Harris (he being Ninety, 28 March 1973)’, English Church Music (1973), 8–10

‘Charles Villiers Stanford: Fifty Years After’, English Church Music (1974), 5–6

‘Memories from the Twentieth Century’, Two Hundred and Fifty Years of the Three Choirs Festival of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester, ed. B. Still (Gloucester, 1977), 20–24; repr. in Organists Review, lxxviii (1992), 33–5